Archive for October, 2009

Why should this person be the “Jerk of the Week”?
Creating films of people dancing and singing for no explainable reason which run for over three hours, and for making all Hollywood musicals look like masterpieces in the process.

Your Name (Optional)
Samuel Gordon-Stewart

Jerk Of The Week with Casey Hendrickson and Heather Kydd airs at 6:09pm on Thursdays on NewsRadio 840 KXNT in Las Vegas. This equates to 12:09pm Friday in Canberra, however it will be 1:09pm next week as the US comes out of daylight saving time on Sunday morning.

Samuel

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Remember the plane that went AWOL last week? The one where the pilots couldn’t get their story straight as to whether or not they had been having an argument or been sleeping when they flew past their destination and ignored calls from air traffic controllers?

Yes? You do? Great. Well, as if that wasn’t bad enough, it has since come to light that, not only were the pilots breaking company policy by using laptops in the cockpit and having a rather passionate training session with the company’s new crew-scheduling program (I would have thought that missing the airport and not noticing it for an hour was a big enough breach of company policy), but that the Federal Aviation Administration also broke their own procedures relating to unresponsive aircraft.

The Federal Aviation Administration violated its own rules by taking more than 40 minutes to alert the military after losing communication with a Northwest Airlines flight last week, according to officials familiar with internal reviews under way at several federal agencies.
[..]
In a statement to The Wall Street Journal Wednesday evening, FAA Administrator Randy Babbitt said air-traffic controllers “should have notified [the military] more quickly that the plane was not responding.” Local controllers apparently became so focused on trying to re-establish contact that they failed to alert higher-level FAA managers about the problem in a timely manner.

Sorry, but I don’t buy that. If you’re on the phone and the line becomes silent, you don’t sit there saying “hello? hello? hello?” for 40 minutes; you hang up and, if necessary, attempt to re-establish communication by actively dialling the other person’s number. I don’t believe for one moment that “local controllers” (note the plural) would put their collective jobs on the line by deciding to not inform their superiors to an unresponsive plane for 40 minutes. It seems much more likely that the FAA simply didn’t notify the military in a timely manner.

This story has already gone well beyond bizarre with its escalating revelations. If it keeps going at this rate, we’ll probably find out on Monday that the FAA did actually notify the military on time, but the reason the air force planes were kept on “stand by” rather than taking to the skies is that it was a national holiday for air force pilots, and the janitor couldn’t work out how to start the plane.

In a way though, I am glad that all of this has happened. Nobody was hurt, and the many flaws in the current implementation of the procedure for dealing with unresponsive aircraft are coming to light. In theory, this should all lead to safer air travel.

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It’s not the first time that this sort of test has been done, and it probably won’t be the last either, but it’s time to knock the stupid theory on the head once and for all.

ABC TV’s Hungry Beast program have found that a carrier pigeon is able to transport a 700MB file between two rural towns, more quickly than a car or the Internet. Apparently this makes pigeons faster than the Internet, supposedly dispelling Kevin Rudd’s theory that we would be worse off under a Liberal government which he seems to think would replace the Internet with carrier pigeons.

In terms of raw throughput, they may be right. The pigeon took one hour and five minutes, which is an average speed of 179.5 kilobytes per seconds. The car took a bit longer…and here’s where the test falls down on throughput…the Internet connection dropped out a number of times and didn’t finish the download, which says more about the phone line used for the Internet connection than anything else.

As it happens, the test is very wrong on throughput, at least in areas with ADSL 2+. On my home connection, I can regularly get downloads of a bit over 2 megabytes per second (2,000 kilobytes per second), which is more than ten times the speed of a pigeon.

That said, the pigeon test can be debunked even further, as the test only takes in to account raw throughput of large files, and completely ignores the way that the Internet actually works.

Take what happens when you visit the home page of this blog for example. Firstly, your web browser sends a request to the server for the page, then the server sends the raw HTML code of the page back to your browser. Your browser reads this, and generates a new request for the css stylesheets as well as every single unique image on the page (16 at the time of writing) as well as all of the embedded content such as YouTube videos of which there are a few, and the servers responsible for these images and embedded content send the requested data back to your browser. If you then go and watch one of the YouTube videos, the browser has to request that, and YouTube’s servers send the data back to your browser.

On the Internet, this doesn’t take very long. Requests go back and forth in moments, and it’s the larger bits of data (images, videos etc) which take time to download due to bandwidth restrictions.

You try doing that with a set of carrier pigeons. This site is hosted on a server in Melbourne, and I’m in Canberra, so your calculations will vary depending on your location, but let’s assume that the news report is accurate and that pigeons fly at about 130km/h (which sounds dubious to me, but we’ll run with it). Melbourne is about 650km away if you go in a straight line, so it would take a pigeon five hours to travel that distance.

Imagine that. You request my website at 7am on Monday, the pigeon arrives in Melbourne at midday, and returns with the HTML code of the website at 5pm. Your browser then requests the css stylesheet and, say, nine images, because you only have ten pigeons at your disposal…they are a finite resource after all. The pigeons arrive in Melbourne at 10pm, and get the data back to you at 3am Tuesday. You now have the stylesheet, so the formatting looks about right, and you have some of the images, although some of the formatting images are linked from the stylesheet so the site is still a bit odd in many places. Your browser requests the rest of the images and the embedded YouTube players, the pigeons get to Melbourne at 8am, and bring the data back to you at 1pm.

So, the total time required to load just the front page of this website via courier pigeon is 30 hours. This would not get any faster if you had more pigeons either, as you wouldn’t have known about the formatting images until you got the stylesheets back.

Thanks to browser caching of formatting images and stylesheets, you might be able to reduce the loading time of subsequent pages on this website to twenty hours, but that doesn’t really make the site any more useful to you.

And just think…if it takes that long to load a domestic webpage, how long would it take to load a website from overseas? It’s about 15,000 kilometres to the US, which is roughly 23 times the distance from Canberra to Melbourne, so if we multiply the domestic loading time of 30 hours by 23…ye gods! It would take 690 hours (28 days and 18 hours) to load the front page of this website. Yes, that’s right, a month to load one page.

And none of this even takes in to account the extra hours required for DNS lookups before you can even send a request to the appropriate server.

All I can say is thank God the ABC and their pigeons don’t run the Internet!

Samuel

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Sydney’s 2NSB, 99.3FM across the north shore, has shut down due to financial problems, apparently. The station is currently relaying the BBC World Service instead of broadcasting local programming, fulfilling its licence condition that it must continue to broadcast until such time as the licence is cancelled or an agreement is reached with ACMA.

The Mosman Daily reports that the station’s board of directors decided to call in the administrators on Monday night, programs were quickly taken off the air in favour of the (cheaper) BBC World Service and the locks were changed. The station had been on the air for 26 years.

Unfortunately the news report is very light-on for details, and is in fact so vague on some points that one can’t help but believe the rumours floating around that there is a fair bit more to the story than what has been reported. If that’s the case, then I expect that we will hear more about this as time goes by.

I am quite disappointed by the closure of 2NSB as I liked the format, and I also enjoyed doing a media news segment with Oly Peterson on Tuesday afternoons.

I must thank reader Max who emailed me about this early this morning, albeit cryptically. Even though it’s bad news, I’m thankful that it was brought to my attention.

Farewell 2NSB.

Update 3pm: Radioinfo have now picked up the story, incorrectly describing the station as “silent” in the process, but have no more details than we have here except to say that some unnamed board members recently resigned. Instead they’ve done the usual “we have nothing but won’t be outdone” reporter’s trick of filling their article with a blow-by-blow account of the station’s history. End Update

Update 6pm: Now Radioinfo are getting somewhere. ACMA have informed them that they will wait “several weeks” for the voluntary administration process to take its course, before deciding whether the broadcasting licence needs to be cancelled. This means that there is a glimmer, albeit a tiny one, that something will eventually fill the role of “2NSB”, although considering that the current format proved to be thoroughly unprofitable, it is unlikely that this will be similar to the 2NSB that we knew. End Update

Update 16 August 2010: John Southgate, one of the people responsible for the revival of 2NSB has written in with the following comment. Thanks John!
Sydney North Shore’s FM99.3 has been operating successfully since February 2010 with a new board of directors and in August 2010 is ready to recruit a permanent station manager. Details of the position can be found on the station web site at FM993.com.au or through SEEK at seek.com.au.End Update

Samuel

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And with that, I’m back. The whole catching up on sleep and getting my energy back thing has been a limited success, but I am now back to being able to put my thoughts in to writing without having to spend a week working out how to word it, so we’ll call it a success.

I’ve got a lot to get through, and seeing as blog posts with multiple short stories in them seem to be the flavour of the trimester on about half the blogs I read, and it’s convenient in this case, I’ll bite and run such a post here.

***

Sleep? Hmmm, well it’s 3:32am as I type this and I last finished sleeping at 8am yesterday. You do the math. That said, in the last few nights I have had dreams where I:
1. Was in a repeat episode of Third Watch. Nobody could be bothered attending to the emergencies as they all knew that the people survived the episode, so why bother risking injury doing the stunts again?
2. I plunged to my death in a taxi, on a wet night where the left half of the road had been washed away. A very vivid and disturbing dream.
3. KXNT’s Alan Stock was elected as Chairman of the Nevada Action Committee, although what this actually achieved is beyond me, because the only thing he was required to do as part of this job was take five minutes out of his show each morning to read the KXNT phone number over and over and over and over and over (we’ll come back to this in five minutes when he’s done with the phone number)

***

Speaking of KXNT, their traffic bed (the music they play under their traffic reports) is one of the bits of music which I managed to get stuck in my head this week. I also managed to get the First Option Mortgage jingle stuck in my head for three excruciating hours, and get it stuck in somebody else’s head simply by mentioning it on Facebook. Apparently it’s called “ear worm”. I also had another song stuck in my head, but I dare not try to remember what it was lest it happen again.

There was some Bollywood movie on SBS Two the other night. I watched ten minutes of it near the beginning during which time the married couple managed to patch up their differences, and the wife declared that she didn’t really care about her husband’s flaws anyway. How they could drag that about the next three hours is beyond me, and I’m glad that I didn’t stick around to find out. The ten minutes was good for a laugh though.

***

Cisco have calculated (which is probably code for “guessed”) that the average broadband Internet user downloads 11.4 gigabytes per month. I average 20-25GB per month and will probably start doubling that in the not-to-distant future if one of my household projects gets off the ground.

***

Facebook have decided to preserve the accounts of deceased members, minus status updates and other “sensitive data”. This intrigues me as I have often thought about what would happen to this site and my other online data if I were to cease existing for whatever reason. I would like to keep it all online permanently, but am yet to find a viable solution. The National Library’s PANDORA project archives the essence of this site, but seems to have a lot of broken links and missing data, which is hardly surprising given the sheer size of this site (6.97GB and growing). Preserving this site is a work in progress…I suppose I’ll just have to stick around for long enough to ensure that it happens.

Anyway, if and when I shuffle off this mortal coil, I’m happy for my Facebook account to be preserved as some sort of shrine, but I don’t want anything to be removed from it. How does one go about sharing this wish with Facebook. One’s will?

***

Speaking of the dead, Yahoo have finally killed off Geocities. I’m glad that I was reminded of this imminent death the other day, as I had one page on there which I needed to save. I’ll republish it on here at some stage.

***

Monash Drive has been removed the ACT “National Capital Plan”. The proposed road had been slated to run along the foot of Mount Ainslie behind Hackett, Ainslie and Campbell, roughly in-line with the already cleared sections which the high voltage power lines use. Politically, the road was never going to happen, which is a pity because it could have reduced a lot of congestion, especially in the years ahead.

***

We’ve been following Barack Obama’s approval ratings here for some months now using the figures from Rasmussen, who had the polling figures closest to the outcome of last year’s election. That said, the other polls are interesting as well, especially when you consider that in the Gallup poll, Obama has recorded the worst third quarter of an elected president in recorded history. A nine point drop in his approval rating in the space of three months.

***

The White House have declared war on FOX News, claiming that they’re not a news organisation. The White House clearly can’t tell the difference between news programming and opinion programming, even when it’s pointed out to them. Funnily enough though, the other networks have defended FOX. Late last week, White House officials tried to ban FOX from a White House Press Pool interview session, but the other networks wouldn’t have a bar of it, quite clearly telling the White House that “if Fox can’t be a part of this, then none of us will interview your chap”. It worked, and the White House backed down, for now.

Here’s the point. FOX out-rate every other cable news network consistently, partially because of their news programming, and partially because of their opinion programming. People want to watch it. The White House don’t like the opinion programming as it is often critical of the Obama administration, unlike others such as MSNBC whose opinion programming often favours the Obama administration. The other networks know that if they let the White House exclude FOX, then they are all trapped in an unwritten “do as we say, or we cut your access” agreement. It is an attack not only on FOX, but on every other network, on freedom of the press, and on freedom of speech.

Glenn Beck, on one of FOX’s opinion shows, put together a rather amusing piece on the War On FOX which had me in hysterics when I first watched it.

One wonders if people would have voted for Obama’s “new era of bi-partisanship” if they had known that “bi-partisan” is defined as “the other side will do as we say, therefore we all agree”.

***

The ANZ Bank have a new logo, and a TV ad which looks strangely familiar…I’ve seen the whole “life juggled above head, but we can make it easier” ad before, I just can’t remember where. Anyway, the logo, is it just me, or does it look like somebody chucking a tantrum after being kept in line for an hour?

***

Channel Seven have announced their new digital channel, to be called “7TWO”, on (you guessed it) channel 72. I’m not in the least bit surprised that regional affiliate Prime aren’t putting it to air straight away, I mean Prime own the “6” channels in digital TV land, and it would look rather silly have 7TWO on channel 62. I suspect that Prime are working on their own branding of the new station…PRIMExtra perhaps?

***

RIP Don Lane, one of the great entertainers, who passed away at the age of 75.

***

Remember when the Large Hadron Collider was about to be turned on for the first time and people were afraid the world was going to end? It amazed me how many people who believed that, were subsequently placated when it was turned on, broke down, and the world didn’t end. The whole cause for concern was for when it would finally reach the actual colliding stage, which it never did.

Clive Robertson filled in for Tim Webster on 2UE and 2CC’s afternoon show yesterday. What a relief! Tim Webster, as much as like him personally, has bored me to death of late…I can not listen to his show any more, I just can’t. Tim is much better suited to a news-based show than the lifestyle-amalgam show that he is now presenting. Clive, however, suits the format perfectly, and is brilliant afternoon entertainment.

Memo to 2UE for next year’s lineup: Breakfast with Mike Jeffreys, Mornings with Stuart Bocking, Afternoons with Clive Robertson, Drive with John Stanley, Nights with The Two Murrays, Overnights with Jim Ball.

***

And now at 6:18 it’s time for KXNT’s traffic and weather together on the eights, here’s Tate South (finally, Alan’s morning Chairman task is finished, which means that I can wrap up this blog post).

***

There was an ad on TV last night for that boat from Victoria to Tasmania and back, in which they advertised the rate for taking your car with you as being an “each way” rate (eg. “x dollars each way”). Sorry, but does that mean it’s the return rate (you can travel each way for this amount) or the one way rate (each way costs x dollars)?

***

Congratulations to Chris Matlock, KXNT’s Radiostar competition winner for this year. I listened to the entries of the 20 finalists when I was last in Deniliquin, and Chris was my favourite from the start, so I was very pleased to see him win. Chris will have his own show soon, apparently, and will start off co-hosting with Ciara Turns on “Sundays with Ciara” on Sunday, November 8 between 10am and 1pm. That will either be 4am-7am or 5am-8am Monday, November 9 in Canberra, depending on whether daylight saving has ended in the US by then.

***

And finally, Lord Christopher Monckton spent much of the latter part of last week and the start of this week outlining the issues with the proposed Copenhagen climate change treaty which, don’t forget, is designed to stop a warming which hasn’t happened in about the last decade. The main points:
1. The setting up of a world government, with binding power over all countries.
2. Some peculiar scheme to send all the money from the western countries to the developing countries, to pay for some supposed “climate debt”.

Glenn Beck interviewed his lordship last week, which makes for very interesting and enlightening listening.
Part one:

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I’ll be back in a few days. Right now, despite having a growing list of things that I would like to write about, I just can’t manage to get started, so I’m not going to try for a few days. Columns from contributors are also suspended until further notice.

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If my life were a television soap opera, the title of this episode would be “a bit out of it”. I’ve lost count of how many times I have said that today.

The doctor proclaimed that I’m fine after looking at me in one of his trademark five-second colsultations, but I’m not convinced that he took the possibility of concussion in to account. I am still “out of it”, I’m struggling to concentrate, my sentence structure is fairly horrendous and my ability to type letters in the correct order is not all that it should be. I’ll give it some time, but if this keeps up, I will be seeking a second opinion.

In the meantime, I’m looking forward to passing to the police on to the details of the calls made from my phone after it was stolen. Yes, these thieves were of the thick variety. Some sleep would also be nice, but is proving to be elusive.

It’s unlikely that I’ll see any of the stolen stuff again, but it would be nice if the police were able to catch up with the three thugs at some stage.

If you’re wondering, I’ll be OK. I was punched in the nose, but the bleeding stopped after a short time. It still hurts, and I will see a doctor about it…but on the whole, I’m just lucky that they didn’t have (or at least produce) any weapons.

It is now fair to say that this year is not in the running for “my favourite year of all time”.

Update: The police media unit has been rather busy today with a number of press releases, so I’m rather pleased that my press release has not only gone out to the media, but is online.

Police seek witnesses to Barton robbery

Monday, 19 October 2009

ACT Policing is seeking witnesses to an aggravated robbery of a 22-year-old Reid man which occurred near the Kings Avenue Bridge, Barton, last night (October 18).

The victim left work around 11.20pm and began to walk home. When he reached the south-end of the Kings Avenue Bridge he was approached by three males on push bikes.

The three males demanded money and the victim handed over $50. They also stole his iPod and mobile telephone. During the robbery the victim was punched once in the nose by the youngest offender, causing it to bleed.

All three offenders were described as being of Aboriginal/Torres Strait Islander appearance. Two were described as being around 18 years old and the third around 14 years old.

Once the offenders left the victim hailed down a taxi and was dropped at City Police Station. Woden Patrols searched the area a short time later but were unable to locate any persons of interest.

Police would urge anyone who may have seen suspicious behaviour in the Kings Avenue Bridge area overnight to contact Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000, or report it via the Crime Stoppers website at www.act.crimestoppers.com.au.

Also I’ll be chatting with Mike Welsh about the robbery on 2CC this afternoon. I’m heading off to the doctor so we’re pre-recording the interview, and I therefore don’t know what time it will go to air. Between 3pm and 6pm on 2CC anyway.End Update

Samuel

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I have been unable to get this song out of my head all week, and as it is the rare occasion in which a song which is stuck in my head is a song which I happen to like, I’m circumventing the random number generator and giving this week’s award to September. The feature song is RIP.

It gets dark and a shiver moves across my skin
There are stars but the cloudy skies won’t let them in
I’m gonna write few words and I hope they carry all the way
Back to the start of this girl
When she still had something good to say

Seventeen
and you know exactly what you need
Twenty two
and they still see something great in you
But no one tells you a word
But the lonely echo in a heart
When this be filled up with hurt
and your whole world starts to come apart

They rest in peace, won’t ever come back
All the stories I was told
I had a dream – it’s fading to black
Just like me it’s growing old
So rest in peace there is no come back
I will never have a hold
Now there is screaming from the pitch black
That this world is not a home

Say goodbye, that’s the only word you’ll ever need
When you try it gets so much harder to succeed
If I had nothing to lose, I would surely lose it in the end
And you know if I could choose I would never do it all again

They rest in peace, won’t ever come back
All the stories I was told
I had a dream – it’s fading to black
Just like me it’s growing old
So rest in peace there is no come back
I will never have a hold
Now there is screaming from the pitch black
That this world is not a home

It’s pumping through my system, get the poison out of me
What good is a believer when there’s nothing to believe
So put me in the shuttle, let me spin around the world
Show me the star
Oh

They Rest In Peace, won’t ever come back
All the stories I was told
I had a dream – it’s fading to black
Just like me it’s growing old

So rest in peace there is no come back
(it’s pumping through my system, get the poison out of me)
I will never have a hold
(what good is a believer when there’s nothing to believe)
Now there is screaming from the pitch black
(so put me in the shuttle let me spend around the world show me the stars)
That this world is not a– that this world is not a home

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Why should this person be the “Jerk of the Week”?
For copying his media strategy from the White House, declaring News Limited newspaper “The Australian” to be a “right-wing” publication with a determined agenda to oppose the government, the day after the White House declared war on FOX News. It’s nice to know that the Bamster and Krudd are both unable to tell the difference between opinion pieces and news reporting.

Your Name (Optional)
Samuel Gordon-Stewart

Casey Hendrickson and Heather Kydd’s Jerk Of The Week airs at 6:09pm Thursday on Newsradio 840 KXNT in Las Vegas (12:09pm Friday in Canberra), but you already knew that.

Samuel

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Random breath testing isn't anything new at school dances. Whilst I avoided the dances like the plague during high school, I remember students being warned very clearly about the presence of breathalysers prior to many of the dances.

I think it's a good idea. Under-18s shouldn't be drinking anyway, and I would hate to think of the potential repercussions for teachers who could be held legally responsible for drunk teenagers. It's a sensible precaution to my mind.

I don’t know how they came up with that caption, because Craig is only mentioned once in the article, talking long ago about events of long ago.

ABC News Coverage head Craig McMurtrie told Media Watch at the time the new system would ”benefit our editorial content” and the glitches were ”teething problems”.

I don’t even see how an image of Craig is relevant to the story considering that he is one of a number of talking heads in the story, and none of them are really relevant, pictorially at least, to the story of ABC TV’s Canberra newsroom adopting the Ignite automation system which has already been adopted in all the other capital city studios.

That said, if you’re going to have a picture for the sake of having a picture, then I suppose you might as well make it of a person who said nothing to you, and insinuate them saying nothing in the caption.

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I am must be briefly do the writings today as I am much to be go to the workings shortly and so can not be do write for long.

It has been week of interestings and for Mr. Boss has done do come back to house for see of gradren which is doing grow of nicely but he is now to be go to Belgium for week as for the business workings and will be do bring back plantinsgf ro me if the nice men of customs are do allow.

I am also did do have the call on tephelephone from Mother of Russia who is doing well and had big scare time when big cat did do roaming of street of where house is as she does have nice pet mouse Squeelivich who is my pet mouse of do live in Russia as for the customrs can not be do let him in to country Australia and she was much worry that big cat would come to try of do eat. Big cat did do get in to house in ways of how is not sure and Mother of Russia did the chasings with broom which did do scare of cat and now all winwdows are to be closed for week until cat has done go away and Squeelivich is much safe and lovely.

I am must do go now so please to be having week of good and plantings are good in this week as it will be do of rain which is good for the gradren but not good for doing the build of the composts this week.